′To Drink the Air and Light′

Abstract

The last chapter of Fuller′s life was as rich as the posthumous accounts by Emerson, Hawthorne and James were impoverished, as profound as they were shallow. Before being wrecked on other shallows — the sandbars off Fire Island which caught and held her ship, the Elizabeth — Fuller achieved a tragic synthesis following the long years of her moratorium. From an unexpected affinity with ′fallen women′ she moved to concern for a fallen foreign nation, Italy. On her eighteenth birthday, she held in her arms a short-lived baby, her youngest brother Edward, born that day; on her fortieth and last birthday she was tending a man dying of smallpox — Captain Seth Hasty of the Elizabeth. Her final letter was about female heroism, that of Mrs Hasty — matching her own attempt to write a heroic life for herself and other women.

We are made to keep in motion, to drink the air and light.

Margaret Fuller¹